Time Is Money: CME Group To Use Perseus Telecom Time Synchronization Service

Advancements in connectivity betwen venues and the various components of the infrastructure required to effect trades quickly and effectively have accelerated considerably over the last few months, raising the bar in terms of low-latency and reliability when connecting to venues globally.

Today, a further technical development has been announced by Perseus Telecom, which has released a time synchronization system, designated High Precision Time.

The functionality of the service is intended to enable customers to synchronize their time systems across various data centers at which the service is provided, commencing with the CME Group Data Center facility in Aurora, Illinois.

Telecommunications Firm Concentrates on Venue Connectivity

The development of systems by which the reduction of latency can be achieved have been invested in during the course of this year by various industry sectors, from infrastructure providers and software developers, to pre and post trade settlement companies, as well as trading venues themselves with a view to increasing their appeal to traders further afield.

In this case, it is a telecommunications company providing the service. Perseus Telecom's service offering consists of various connectivity solutions for different applications, all aimed at reducing latency of data transfer across enterprise networks. The company has significant demand for such connectivity between New York and Brazil, and on the other side of the Atlantic, between London and Frankfurt, an area which other companies also are increasing their connectivity solutions, despite Germany's regulatory authority BaFIN having taken a somewhat restrictive view on high-frequency trading.

With this particular application, CME Co-Location Services will provide cross-connect access to High Precision Time via a certified NIST Global Positioning Sensor (GPS) antenna, providing UTC timescale accuracy and a choice of two delivery protocols, namely Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

Cabling is either via the company's RJ45 copper or coaxial system, with 1 gigabyte per second or 10 gigabytes per second, and dedicated fiber cross-connect.

Craig Mohan, Managing Director of Co-Location and Data Center Services at CME Group made a corporate statement today on the release: "We are committed to providing the CME Group trading community with the proper and relevant technology needed in a high-tech datacenter environment".

We have partnered with Perseus Telecom to make this service available to all customers located in Aurora at a time when regulatory changes and the need to have more precision in reporting trading events are crucial to sound Risk Management " concluded Mr. Mohan.